Ruth Eisenbud, Ecoanimal Correspondent

Behind the fancy attire and rituals, there’s only cold-blooded sadism against animals.

Editor’s Note:
In Britain fox hunts are often a class issue, with working and middle class youths battling the paid goons of the “master class”, the game wardens and their hirelings, mindlessly serving bloodthirsty snobs and decadents that need to be denounced, opposed at every juncture, and seen for the moral depravity they represent. These self-fashioned aristocrats are not fit to be ruling anyone, and their “elegant” customs, such as fox hunting, speak clearly to the reality of their base instincts. Long live the hunt saboteurs!—PG

Hunt Saboteurs Association News Release 30/12/2013

On Saturday December 28th hunt saboteurs from Yorkshire attended a Pony Club meet of the York & Ainsty South Foxhounds at Escrick Park.

Three foxes that were deliberately hunted were aided in their escape by the sabs through the course of the day and, as the sun was going down, three terrier men were found just as they were about to finish digging the second fox out of an active badger sett.

The sabs began to obstruct the men from continuing this illegal activity and the situation began to escalate, with about 8-10 more men with spades soon arriving at the scene. One sab was smashed in the head with the pistol the men planned to shoot the fox with and was also knocked down in a field by the men’s pickup truck. The sabs were not deterred by this, fought off the attackers and stood their ground.

On stopping the dig-out the sabs had to prize a terrier from the fox as it had locked on to the fox’s face. Sabs then had to help the fox free from the earth as the earth around it had been caved in, leaving only its head exposed. The fox escaped with little visable injury, the terrier’s face was badly wounded from fighting the fox.

The group are now preparing to prosecute the hunt for their actions and ask Escrick Park to stop facilitating these criminal activities. Anyone concerned by the activities of the Y&AS hunt should contact Escrick Park ( http://www.escrick.com/contact-us) to ask that they refuse the hunt access from now on.

Lee Moon, spokesperson for the Hunt Saboteurs Association, stated: “Only two days after Boxing Day we see the real face of fox hunting. Boxing Day is the sanitized, media friendly press stunt that the hunting community use each year to pull the wool over the eyes of the British public. This is the grim reality of what occurs the rest of the time when the media spotlight is elsewhere. Escrick Park are a major supporter of the York and Ainsty South Hunt and are just as guilty as they allow these illegal acts to take place on their land. We call on them to ban the hunt from their estate before they become embroiled in any legal action taken against the hunt.”

By Rowan Wolf – Cyrano’s Journal Today

[The front page of The Oregonian from December 29, 2013.]

In typical corporate media fashion, my local paper places totally contradictory articles – not only in the same edition, but on the same page. The big headline reads “Portraits in Aging Gracefully.” It is a human interest story about three local women in an upscale “retirement community.”  The women interviewed in the article “talk about lives well lived and what lies ahead.” Just to the left of the banner story is “Retirement fiscal cliff is looming worldwide” an AP story by David McHugh.

Of course there is a direct relationship between the two articles – namely retirement. There is also the obvious contradiction.

McHugh tells us:

Many people will be forced to work well past the traditional retirement age of 65 — to 70 or even longer.

Living standards will fall, and poverty rates will rise for the elderly in wealthy countries that built safety nets for seniors after World War II. In developing countries, people’s rising expectations will be frustrated if governments can’t afford retirement systems to replace the tradition of children caring for aging parents.

This does not exactly provide a good start for “aging gracefully.”

And what is driving this race to the bottom for the global aging population? Well according to McHugh:

— Countries are slashing retirement benefits and raising the age to start collecting them. These countries are awash in debt after overspending last decade and racking up enormous deficits since the recession. Now, they face a demographics disaster as retirees live longer and falling birth rates mean there will be fewer workers to support them.

— Companies have eliminated traditional pension plans that cost employees nothing and guaranteed them a monthly check in retirement.

— Individuals spent freely and failed to save before the recession, and they saw much of their wealth disappear once it hit.

Oh yes, let us not forget the governments having to stand surety for corporations bugging out on their retirement commitments (at least in the US). Unfortunately for workers, their retirement largely went down the drain with their retirement savings. We have seen the beastly culmination of this in the Detroit bankruptcy which neatly swallowed the retirement of public workers.

So two of the three “convergence factors” tie directly back to big monied interests. What about the third – the profligate spending by individuals? As wages eroded, the middles class was forced to move more of their expenses to credit, and then roll that credit into second (and third and fourth) mortgages to dig their way out of the hole. And the biggest sources of that debt (and bankruptcy) was not fancy cars and big screen TVs, but  medical debt. Stupid people trying to keep themselves alive to retire rather than saving for retirement.

Of course, for a couple of (middle class) generations that came before, their home was their investment bank. It just took “liberalizing” the financial sector for the financiers to steal those investment banks, and get paid for doing so.

Now, across the globe, those (in the middle class) heading for retirement have been driven to the verge and beyond. No graceful aging for them. Nor, of course for those lower than middle class who had no savings or retirement plans to start with.

In the “Aging Gracefully” article, the women live in the Marys Woods Retirement Community. It is (as you might guess from the name) a place for the well-heeled to retire. As per the community’s site:

Hidden along the Willamette River in Lake Oswego, Mary’s Woods offers 19 acres of beautiful villas and apartments in a retirement community lifestyle surrounded by the charm, spirit and natural splendor of this historic area.

This is the place for the better off, and those who had the good luck to have saved, and cashed out on those savings, before the corporate piranhas ate up their retirement plans, and they were able to cash out their personal “investment banks” (homes) before the corporate finance raiders got to them.

Somehow, I suspect that fewer and fewer will be “aging gracefully,” nor retiring to places with 19 acre grounds with hiking paths. More likely they will join their children in the debtor’s prisons that are likely to reemerge on the landscape.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rowan Wolf, whose academic career is in sociology, is Cyrano’s Journal Today’s Editor in Chief. Dr. Wolf’s focus is often on the intersection of politics and environmental policy, but her interests range over a very broad field. 

By Robert Stevens, wsws.org

The US National Security Agency (NSA) runs an Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), described by Germany’s Der Spiegel as the “NSA’s top operative unit—something like a squad of plumbers that can be called in when normal access to a target is blocked.”

A report published Sunday based on documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden states that the TAO operates as a vast hacking unit on behalf of the US government.

Based in San Antonio, Texas and formed in 1997, the TAO, “are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO’s area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO’s disposal have become—and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks.”

In 2008, the TAO unit had 60 specialists the magazine said—a number set to escalate to 270 by 2015. The TAO’s duties according to the NSA are based on “Getting the ungettable.”

A document seen by Der Spiegel cites a former head of the TAO who comments that it had collected “some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen” and has “access to our very hardest targets.”

The remit of the TAO is enormous, with the former head stating it “needs to continue to grow and must lay the foundation for integrated Computer Network Operations.”

In a statement that reveals how the mass surveillance operations of the NSA are intimately tied to the drive by US imperialism to dominate its rivals internationally, the former head states that the TAO must “support Computer Network Attacks as an integrated part of military operations.”

Outlining its future role, she said the TAO would have to acquire “pervasive, persistent access on the global network.”

Der Spiegel reports that this is precisely what has been achieved. “During the middle part of the last decade, the special unit succeeded in gaining access to 258 targets in 89 countries—nearly everywhere in the world,” Der Spiegelnotes. “In 2010, it conducted 279 operations worldwide.”

Through their hacking operations the TAO has “directly accessed the protected networks of democratically-elected leaders of countries” states DerSpiegel. It notes in passing, “Workers at NSA’s target selection office…had Angela Merkel in its sights in 2002 before she became [German] chancellor…”

Der Spiegel states that the TAO “infiltrated networks of European telecommunications companies and gained access to and read mails sent over Blackberry’s BES email servers, which until then were believed to be securely encrypted.”

The global reach of the TOA is vast, with Der Spiegel reporting that the “San Antonio office handles attacks against targets in the Middle East, Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia, not to mention Mexico, just 200 kilometers (124 miles) away, where the government has fallen into the NSA’s crosshairs.”

One of the presentation slides states that a critical TAO goal is to “subvert endpoint devices.” These include the many main devices that make up modern communication technologies including “servers, workstations, firewalls, routers, handsets, phone switches, SCADA systems, etc.”

Der Spiegel explains, “SCADAs are industrial control systems used in factories, as well as in power plants” and notes that the “most well-known and notorious use of this type of attack was the development of Stuxnet, the computer worm whose existence was discovered in June 2010. The virus was developed jointly by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, and successfully so.”

The TAO has developed various means to gain access to the PCs of Internet users. One slide reveals that TAO is able to gain “passive access” to a machine via Microsoft’s automated PC crash reports. Der Spiegel notes, “even this passive access to error messages provides valuable insights into problems with a targeted person’s computer and, thus, information on security holes that might be exploitable for planting malware or spyware on the unwitting victim’s computer.”

TAO operatives even created an internal graphic, for their own amusement, which replaced Microsoft’s original error message with one reading, “This information may be intercepted by a foreign sigint system to gather detailed information and better exploit your machine.”

Sigint is the acronym for “signals intelligence”, meaning the gathering of intelligence by interception of signals.

Another document reveals that among the TAO’s “most productive operations” is the direct interception of new PCs and other computer accessories ordered by individuals targeted by the NSA.

In a process named “interdiction”, the goods are rerouted from the supplier to one of the TAO’s secret workshops. Der Spiegel states that TAO agents then “carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. All subsequent steps can then be conducted from the comfort of a remote computer.”

Interdiction allows the TAO to exploit networks “around the world,” said the document.

The information on the TAO was published just days after Edward Snowden broadcast an “alternative” Christmas Day television message for Britain’s Channel 4, to contrast with that given by the Queen. Speaking from his forced exile in Moscow, Snowden said the world’s population have recently “learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance, watching everything we do.”

He added that “the conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it. Together, we can find a better balance.”

His message followed an interview with the Washington Post December 24 in which he said of the revelations he has made available, “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished… Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”

Snowden has exposed a state intelligence apparatus of genuine totalitarian dimensions, which spies on the entire world’s population and his courage and dedication to the preservation of basic democratic rights are admirable. However, if he believes that “a better balance” can now be found, he is mistaken.

Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency, said Sunday that he had thought of Snowden as a “defector,” but is now “drifting in the direction of perhaps more harsh language…such as ‘traitor.’ I think there’s an English word that describes selling American secrets to another government, and I do think it’s treason.”

Earlier this month John Bolton, US ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration, said, “My view is that Snowden committed treason, he ought to be convicted of that, and then he ought to swing from a tall oak tree.”

Similarly, former CIA director James Woolsey declared that Snowden “should be prosecuted for treason. If convicted by a jury of his peers, he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead.”